A World to Explore

Archive for June 19th, 2011

For some reason the Fossil of the Week I’ve had the most comments about is the Ordovician honeycomb coral from Indiana. It has an unexpected polygonal symmetry reflected in many other geological materials like desiccation cracks and columnar basalt. So this week’s fossil is another coral with a surprising shape: the chain coral Halysites.

Halysites is a tabulate coral genus originally named by Johann Fischer von Waldheim in 1828. Its corallum (colonial skeleton) consists of long vertical tubes (corallites) laterally attached to each other in ranks so that a cross-section looks like a series of chain links. Each corallite held a single coral polyp (an individual) that collected zooplankton for food. The spaces between the ranks — the empty holes — are called lacunae.

A closer view of the halysitid corallum. This specimen is replaced with silica so the surrounding limestone matrix could be removed by dissolving it in hydrochloric acid.

Halysites lived only in the Ordovician and Silurian (about 480 to 420 million years ago), so it is a rough index fossil for these periods. They were especially common in coral reefs, adding stability because their lacunae filled with sediment making them very difficult to dislodge by currents.

Thin-section of a halysitid coral with limestone matrix still in the star-shaped lacunae.